The Florentines, headed by the renowned Renaissance hermeticist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-94) believed they had discovered in Kabbalah a lost divine revelation that could give the key to understanding the teachings of Pythagoras, Plato, and the Orphics, and the inner secrets of Catholic Christianity. Pico himself had a considerable amount of Kabbalistic literature translated into Latin by the scholarly convert Samuel ben Nissim Abulfaraj.
Among the 900 theses Pico presented for public debate in Rome was the claim that "no science can better convince us of the divinity of Jesus Christ than magic and the Kabbalah ", and he believed he could prove the dogmas of the Trinity and the Incarnation through Kabbalistic axioms.
All this caused a sensation in the intellectual Christian world, and the writings of Pico and his follower Johannes Reuchlin (1455-1522) led on the one hand to great interest in the doctrine of Divine Names and in practical (magical) Kabbalah (culminating in Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim's De Occult Philosophia (1531) and on the other to further attempts at a synthesis between Kabbalah and Christian theology. [Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah, pp.197-8]
Pico della Mirandola, a major Renaissance Gnostic, Hermeticist and Cabalist, was described by Vicomte Léon de Poncins’ in Judaism and the Vatican:
"Pico de Mirandola, who died in Florence, Italy in 1494, was a hebraiser who devoted himself to studying the Cabbala under the direction of Jewish masters such as Jehuda Abravanel:
"It was in the princely house of Pico de Mirandola that the Jewish scholars used to meet….The discovery of the Jewish Cabbala, which he imparted to various enlightened Christians contributed far more than the return to Greek sources to the extraordinary spiritual blossoming which is known as the Renaissance. About half a century later, the rehabilitation of the Talmud was to lead to the Reformation….Pico de Mirandola had understood that the indispensable purification of Christian dogma could only be effected after a profound study of the authentic Jewish Cabbala".
James Webb, author of The Occult Underground, wrote of Renaissance scholar Pico della Mirandola, a student of Marsillo Ficino, founder of the neo-Platonic Academy of Florence, Italy. Pico de Mirandola "...conceived of Hermes and Plato as aids to persuading those to religion who would not accept Scripture alone."
"This reasoning appears eventually to have been endorsed by the Church in the case of Pico, who joined to his Hermetism a 'Christian Cabala,' and concocted a universal system in which Cabalistic ideas played a considerable part. Although condemned by a tribunal, Pico's synthesis was rehabilitated in 1493 by Alexander VI, whose recognition of the Cabalist as a loyal son of theChurch seemed to give some authority to Pico's position. It should be remembered in this context that Sixtus IV (Pope, 1471-84) had himself translated seventy Cabalistic books into Latin, and that the concept of the 'Christian Cabala' was not peculiar to Italian thought. Reuchlin, the foremost Orientalist of the time, and the author of the first Hebrew grammar, came nearest to success in the attempt to transform the Cabala into Christian philosophy - although his pupil Widmanstadt considered the Jewish tradition as 'a Trojan horse introduced into the Church'. But the Hermeticists and Cabalists of the Renaissance were always maintaining their orthodoxy."
Drach's "De l'Harmonie entre l'Eglise et la Synagogue II," confirms that Pico della Mirandola received instruction in the Kabbala. Pico de Mirandola imagined that it held the doctrines of Christianity and therefore caused Pope Sixtus IV to order the Latin translations for the use of divinity students.
The original address of this text is:
http://